How to improve competitiveness in the digital age
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After successfully defeating the challenges of television, newspapers are facing the threat of the "new media" Internet. But newspapers can continue to thrive because they have the best resources for collecting, disclosing, and distributing information. However, to maintain this advantage in the new environment, newspaper managers must analyze the direction of their business: Are you in the information industry or the printing industry? Or both? For many newspapers, the biggest opportunity is to collect and disclose information, not production and distribution.
Digital technology can separate the process of creating newspaper content from the production and distribution processes. However, this will also create a series of new challenges, in which the connection and management of each other is a prominent problem. With the increase of columns and layouts, the complexity of newspaper production management is increasing, which is beyond the ability of manpower to handle. The tracking management method of “paper record” can no longer keep up with the development of the times. Therefore, maintaining a balance between editing and printing in a newspaper requires sophisticated data management tools, which requires the development of a full digital workflow. It not only enhances business control, but also improves the work management model and has a positive effect on the development of color printing processes.
Strengthen control
Your goal is pretty clear: try to print in color whenever possible, and increase the number of regional versions to be able to target targeted ads and content while reducing costs. Although this sounds difficult to do, it is absolutely possible to do it through a full digital workflow. As long as all articles and advertisements are in digital format, newspaper producers have more control and flexibility, no matter how many columns and versions are exported. Storing pages in digital documents is easier to handle than film or dot matrix storage and is easier to control.
For newspaper printing, especially in print shops in different places, with multiple presses, the progress of the digital workflow is of great significance. First of all, the digital workflow makes the page numbering more flexible, and the imposition method can meet the requirements of the editorial department, the advertising department and each printing workshop. The trend of digitization allows you to make better use of existing satellite systems. Moreover, full digital workflows can greatly increase reliability by balancing workload and fault tolerance for different output devices.
Even after the layout is transferred to the print shop, the benefits of digital workflow can be reflected. Because digital workflows have the flexibility to apply different output parameters at the last minute, newspaper producers can tailor the image to be printed to fit different presses, so that the colors printed on multiple presses are consistent. . Finally, although film will still be used for a while, direct plate making will become mainstream due to more efficient and high quality printing.
In addition, with the emphasis on cost control in most newspapers, the development of a full digital workflow enables your newspaper to effectively reuse content, categories, and advertisements on new media, such as the Internet and CD-ROM.
Improve work management mode
Newspaper printers have always faced many deadlines, and these deadlines are getting harder to cope with. No matter how many columns or versions are added, more information must be processed within 24 hours. This is the bottom line.
While improving the efficiency of layout processing can be beneficial to productivity, more significant efficiency improvements are achieved through better work management. Since the system often has to deal with many changes in a critical situation, the processing power of a separate page or part of a page can contribute a lot to productivity and it will be better to "upstream" the production process. This approach requires your work management system to take advantage of existing features. For example: an eight-page page with text on it and an advertisement below. A good job management system is capable of outputting an advertisement before the text is ready, and then joining the two parts in the plate making process without the need for additional manual stripping. Even for color pages, this solution is feasible.
Work management can also cope with the challenge of publishing multiple regional versions. For such newspapers that are distributed across multiple print points, coordination is more difficult to print than one or two print points. A powerful work management system provides the ability to identify each plate. In this way, the press shop can confirm that it is using the correct plate. Not only that, but the system can also provide methods to production managers at headquarters to verify that the plates received are correct and printed at different printers.
Undoubtedly, the dot matrix workflow adopted by many newspapers is the current standard. They are more reliable, and most newspapers have installed the necessary infrastructure to support this process. However, because the dot matrix files are large and require a large amount of bandwidth, they are insufficient in terms of speed. In addition, the work management system must be able to adapt the bitmap file to a variety of different resolution output devices and have the ability to handle compression distortion. If the system can process both PostScript and PDF files in addition to dot matrix files, you can further increase productivity.
Another step that saves time in the work management process is proofing. Advertisers spend a lot of money on creating brands and advertising materials, and color images can enhance brand effectiveness. Production systems must be able to support synthetic proofing and color separation proofing equipment, including soft proofing, so that problems can be identified before printing.
Develop routine procedures for color printing
From an economic point of view, color is an effective way to attract high-margin advertising. High-quality color printing can increase readership and circulation in a highly competitive market. Ultimately, black and white printing will be difficult to compete with color printing. Although the goal is clear and easy to see, it is difficult to implement. The color printing work of newspapers must be able to accommodate multiple printing points, a variety of printing presses of different periods and different performances. Unless the color is standard and accurate, the advertiser will be disappointed and the reader will be lost.
The all-digital workflow is a key factor in achieving consistent and reliable color production because it enables output parameters for each press. Using a calibration tool such as a spectrophotometer and color management software, the entire process begins with identifying the characteristics of the press. Pushing back to the image capture, whether the image was taken by scanning in a traditional way or by a digital camera.
Once the data is collected, the calibration curve is set and the work management system can apply the correct data to each output device, ensuring that each plate at each print point achieves the best results. The system alerts the operator when there is a discrepancy in the format of the document, a problem with the color space or color gamut, or when the advertisement provided by the customer has a spot color and the plate does not print a spot color.
PDF: Portable, reliable and flexible
Time has never stopped, and it has never slowed down. The competition in the newspaper industry requires every step of the newspaper production process to be as fast as possible to increase productivity. Nowadays, there are many kinds of digital workflows on the market, no matter which one you use, it will have a huge impact on production. One of the most common workflows is to deliver rasterized pages with high resolution, providing high reliability but insufficient speed and flexibility. The dot matrix files are not only large, they put pressure on the electronic delivery system, and it is not possible to "re-use" these pages on other media.
The emergence of PDF (portable file format) has brought a breakthrough to the newspaper industry: it has both the reliability of dot matrix workflow and the high efficiency of compressed text format. The current workflow requires that the PostScript document be rasterized into a bitmap format before being transmitted. PDF can separate the data analysis step from the dot matrix processing step, allowing the transfer step to occur between the two. In this way, the editorial department can produce a stable and reliable document without the need to screen at a certain resolution at this stage.
The advantages of PDF are many: PDF can output the same style on any device, and can correspond to different printers through different output curves. Moreover, the file size of a PDF document is only one-twelfth that of the same PostScript document, and one-fifth of that of a TIFF/IT file. So Associated Press Adsend chose PDF as the document exchange format and hopes to get ANSI/ISO certification.
PDF also addresses a range of hardware and software compatibility issues as it is an operating platform-independent format supported by 16 different operating systems including Mac, Windows (9X, NT and 2000) and Unix. Acrobat Version 4.0 and PDF version 1.3 support the automated process of PJTF work flyers, OPI 2.0 specification, duotone (used in PostScript3RIP) and spot colors, Acrobat 4.0 also has a "digital signing" tool that allows editors and advertisers to recognize without having to sign the page.
With Apple's new operating system (OS/X) and Adobe's InDesign application, working with PDFs is even more seamless, as both support PDF as an original document format. In this way, the standardization/distillation steps are completely eliminated, further increasing productivity without losing support for the old system, you can still generate PostScript Level 1 or 2 documents are used for final output and platemaking. By combining with PhotoShop and Illustrator, photos and images can be edited in InDesign, speeding up the design and modification of the page. It can also import QuarkXPress 3.3x and 4.0x files, including style sheets, bring productivity to the limit.
In addition to helping print productivity, PDF brings other benefits to the newspaper. The first is that the same document can be published in any form (paper or electronic publication) without adding any processing steps. Newspapers can become an online electronic version without converting the page to HTML. In addition, PDF can be indexed to support search engines, making it easy for editors and journalists to find old data in the process of collecting information. At the same time, a new source of income can be created to pay for readers who need to obtain expired newspapers.